Ice Cream and Bleachers
by WildwingSuz
Summary: Post-ep for "The Unnatural". The night isn’t done yet. Just what I thought might have happened after the camera panned up to the stars and left us with a smile on our faces.


**Ice Cream and Bleachers**

_By Suzanne L. Feld_

Rated PG for language

The ball arched up into the night sky and disappeared among the myriad sparkling dots. "Sorry, man, that's all there is," the kid yelled to us. "You owe me twenty bucks, Rockefeller."

The tip of the bat hit the dirt in front of my feet and I felt more than heard Mulder's chuckle against my back as I let go of it. "Don't go anywhere, Scully," he rumbled against my ear, giving me one last squeeze back against him before his arms and the bat disappeared from around me. "The fun isn't over yet."

I bit back a sarcastic reply, not wanting to ruin this magical evening. Standing where he left me, I watched as he leaned the bat against the chain-link of the batting cage. He went over and gave the kid a couple of bills, then loped back to me as the boy ran off in the direction of the parking lot. "What, you're not even going to give him a ride home?" I asked as Mulder got within talking distance.

"He's fine—and I have no clue where he lives. Hell, he can afford a cab with how much I just gave him," he said dismissively. "Now. What say you we go get ice cream since I owe you one?"

I blanked for a moment, then remembered Mulder grabbing and dropping my dreamsicle this morning. "So you do. But where are we going to get ice cream at this time of night? It's nearly ten o'clock."

"Ah, but it's a Saturday," Mulder laid his arm around my shoulders and urged me to walk with him towards the car. "And this town rock and rolls all night long. Ride with me, Scully? I'll bring you back to get your car."

I nodded, wondering if I should put my arm around him in return or what. But we weren't pressed together, our bodies barely brushed as we walked so I just left my arms where they were.

We were slowly getting back to our normal relationship after the mess with Padgett last month, and I had noticed that Mulder was getting more and more affectionate as the days went by. In fact, come to think of it, he'd been doing this ever since our one and only undercover assignment at the Falls of Arcadia in California. I'd been annoyed with him thanks to Diana Fowley, but by the time we left I'd pretty much worked my way through it—although I certainly hadn't said anything to him about it, nor had he mentioned it to me.

We walked to his car in silence, and I didn't say a thing when he opened the passenger door for me although I did smile up at him as I got in. He knew better than to do this when we were working, but I'd allow him to be a gentleman in our off time. He went around to the driver's side and pulled his black leather jacket out of the back seat, putting it on over his baseball jersey before he slid in.

I couldn't help but dwell on the feeling of his arms around me, the power of his strong body moving against my back, and the _other_ piece of wood that had poked into my back that we'd both silently agreed to ignore which had gone away after a while—but which I took as quite the compliment. Even walking the few yards here, the feeling of his arm draped carelessly around my shoulders was burned into my mind. When, I wondered, had Mulder become more than my law-enforcement partner and a very good friend?

Things were changing between us and I didn't like it when I wasn't near Mulder. But when he was sitting just a couple feet away, driving along the dark Georgetown streets in search of an open ice cream parlor, it was all I could do not to simply jump on him and have done with this seemingly-unending, annoying sexual tension between us. But I knew I wouldn't, couldn't do it; I treasured our friendship far too much to push it past the limits we had silently set long ago. That was exactly what Mulder was now doing and I'd go along with it for the time being and see where it took us, though it was getting harder and harder to give him those exasperated looks when I'd rather have leapt into his arms and sucked the lips right off of his face.

"Town's just hopping after dark, eh?" I remarked a short time later, after we'd passed a closed Baskin Robbins, Ben & Jerry's, Thomas Sweet's, and a Coldstone's. "I think we're out of luck, Mulder. Why don't we have a coffee instead? Starbucks is still open," I said as we passed one.

"Nah, I've got my heart set on ice cream, but I think you're right. Hey, there we go!"

I stared over at him as he pulled into the brightly lit parking lot of a 7-Eleven and stopped the car before the building. "Isn't this romantic?" I remarked dryly. Somehow I'd gotten a picture in my head of Mulder and I sitting at a small wrought-iron table in an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. "We can sit on a parking block and share a Slurpee with two straws."

He draped his left arm over the steering wheel and turned to face me with a big grin. With his wind-tousled hair he looked like an oversized kid. "Romance, Scully?" he said. "If it's romance you want I can try to oblige you, ice cream or no ice cream." He waggled his eyebrows at me, and I burst out laughing. God, it felt so good after the horrors of the last month or so.

"I may take you up on that one of these days, Mulder, but for now I'll settle for ice cream; you've gotten my taste buds involved and nothing else will do."

"Okay, you stay here and I'll be right back."

I sat in his car and waited while he went in, watching him through the large plate-glass windows as he dug through the ice cream freezer and was very careful to not let me see what he was getting. When he got back in the car and set a small brown paper bag between us, I reached for it and he swatted my hand away. "Uh-uh. It's a surprise, so hold your horses."

"Getting bossy, aren't you?" I raised a brow at him, but he just grinned and started the car, backing out and heading back the way we'd come.

"Think you'd be used to it by now."

"Hah! That'll be the day."

We rode the rest of the way back to the ballfield in a comfortable silence, the radio playing old rock'n'roll just barely loud enough to be heard. "Isn't this where we started, Mulder?" I said as he pulled up next to my car. If he was going to just drop me off and leave I was going to be disappointed, and would let him know it.

"It is, and it's where the night will end, eventually, as well," he said, grabbing the bag and getting out of the car. "C'mon, Scully, don't give up on me now."

I rolled my eyes and followed him. But instead of going back to the batting cage, he climbed up the bleachers to the very top row. I followed and sat next to him close enough that our arms brushed. It was a mild, cool spring night, with no breeze and a clear, star-filled sky above, just a degree or two above uncomfortable in my light cloth jacket. The field was dark, the lights out, but I could see the scattered white dots that were the baseballs we'd smacked all over the place. I wondered who was going to clean it up, then got distracted when Mulder finally opened the bag.

"Taa-daa!" he said, pulling a roughly triangular blue-and-white package from the bag. "For you, m'lady."

I took it from him, grinning with delight as I turned it around in my hands. "A Drumstick! I haven't had one of these since I was about twelve years old."

He grinned smugly back at me, opening his own with those long, nimble fingers. "After seeing you with that nonfat tofutti thing that's what I figured," he said, folding the paper back and biting into the top of the cone. "Let go for once, Scully. Be a rebel too."

I chuckled as I unwrapped mine, catching a falling bit of nut with one finger and licking it off. I felt his eyes boring into me but I didn't look back at him, instead biting into the chocolate topping and getting a mouthful of that and vanilla ice cream and nuts—heaven! "This is _really_ good, Mulder," I mumbled through it. "Even if I do have to do twenty minutes of crunches to make up for it."

"Count the batting practice tonight," he said, already biting into his cone. I was barely done with the ice cream. "I'm sure that burned off a few calories."

We were silent while we finished our ice cream, and no matter how many calories it was I ate every last bit of mine, cone and all. When done, we both put our wrappers in the paper bag at our feet, then Mulder leaned back on both hands and gazed up at the sky, then raised one arm. "Not much light pollution out here. See, there's Venus."

I leaned over closer to him and followed his pointing finger. "The flickering red dot?"

"That's it. You know who Venus was, right?"

I glanced over at him, his face mere inches from mine. He was looking up at the planet, but I would change that in a minute. After six years of partnership I knew exactly which buttons to push to get Mulder's attention. "Venus was the Roman goddess associated with love, beauty, and fertility, the equivalent of the Greek Aphrodite. She was also the consort of Vulcan, god of volcanoes and blacksmiths. She was considered the ancestor of the Roman people and a key player in many Roman religious festivals and myths."

"Wow," Mulder said softly, smiling at me. I half-expected another wiseass proposal like the one he'd thrown at me when I was in Maine investigating the demon-doll case, but instead he said, "Someone paid attention during their mythology classes."

His eyes, his smile, his soft voice set off something warm in the general vicinity of my heart and without thinking about it I sat forward, then leaned my elbows on my knees and cupped my face in my palms, gazing out at the dark field. "I've always been fascinated by the similarities of the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods," I admitted. Then froze as I felt his hand slowly run over the back of my head, fingers combing through my hair gently.

As if nothing unusual was going on, he asked, "Have you read Dumézil's _Archaic Roman Religion_? That's a good one for comparisons of early gods."

"I... don't think so," I said, still staring straight ahead but feeling my insides just about melt from the gentleness of his undemanding touch. "I just finished _Memoirs of Cleopatra_ by, uh, Margaret George. Fiction based on known facts, very good. I couldn't bear to read the last chapter where she took the asp to her breast, I got so involved with the characters." I was babbling and I knew it, but seemed at a loss to stop. "It really emphasizes both the similarities _and_ the differences between the Egyptian, Roman, and Greek gods of the time."

His arm went around me and his hand had settled on my right shoulder while I was talking, but he didn't try to pull me closer. "I haven't read a fiction novel in a while, unless you count the crop circle books I've been using to check them out," he said with humor clear in his voice. "They've had some really unusual ones recently in England that I've been thinking about going to look at."

"Is there such a thing as a usual crop circle?" I asked, turning my head just slightly to see where he was. My hair fell over the side of my face and all I could see were his legs and his left hand, which was resting lightly on his thigh.

Mulder laughed out loud, giving my shoulders a little squeeze. "You have a point there, Scully." Then out of the corner of my eye I saw him reach over and felt my hair being moved out of my face and tucked behind my ear so that I could see him, his face only inches from mine.

He was looking directly at me, his eyes shadowed and dark so I couldn't see their color, which fluctuated depending on his mood and what color clothes he was wearing. His lips were parted and my eyes fell to them while thoughtlessly biting my own lower lip. For one breathless moment I thought he was going to try and kiss me—and in that moment I probably would have allowed it—but then without thinking about it, I sat back a little, leaned against him, and laid my head on his shoulder. His arm tightened slightly around me and he laid the side of his face on the top of my head, sighing a little. Neither of us said anything for a while, and I let myself relax into the warmth of his side and enjoy the arm around me without thinking about it too much or overanalyzing it. I couldn't help but think of our aborted kiss a few months back and wonder why I had responded then but not now. Now was not the time and I knew it—and it seemed like he must have, too, as he wasn't pushing me.

"I'll tell you, Scully, listening to the story that Arthur Dales told me today really made me think," he said softly from above me, his jaw moving against my hair. "Not just about the job, or the X-Files, but my life in general. This quest, finding Samantha, proving aliens exist here on Earth. How important is all this in the greater scheme of things?"

I snuggled a little closer into his body and rubbed my cheek against his shoulder. "We save lives, Mulder, and maybe someday we'll save the planet from aliens, who knows," I said. "And if we can eventually find some personal happiness, slay a few demons along the way, then it's all good. I'm happy where I am right now; how about you?"

He was silent for a few beats, then admitted, "I want more in my life, but I don't think now is the right time." Turning slightly, he kissed the top of my head and it was all I could do not to lift my face to his. "But I think that I—_we_--will know when it is."

I smiled a little at his correction. "I think so too." Then before I could think twice I added, "Padgett was right, you know."

When he let out a small gasp I knew that he knew exactly what I meant and his next words caught in my heartstrings again, causing that pang. "He just didn't realize that it went both ways."

We sat quietly for some time, comfortable together and enjoying the night. So many unasked questions had been answered that I felt like a huge depressing weight had been taken from my shoulders and replaced with his warm, comfortable arm. "So, Scully, you ready to call it a night?" he finally said.

I sat up slowly as he removed his arm, rubbing my back lightly on the way. "Not yet. You still have a story to tell me, but why don't we do that over a cup of tea at my place?"

As I stood he looked up at me, frowning slightly. "Story? What story?"

"Whatever it was that Arthur Dales told you that brought all this about. I'd really like to know what started one of the most enjoyable evenings of my life, Mulder." I smiled as I put my hand out to him, which he took with a big grin stretching his face.

"You got it," he said as I led him down the bleachers, our hands still entwined. "First of all, he's not the Arthur Dales we met in Florida, it's his brother with the same name..."

_finis_


End file.
